In widescreen format, my camcorder captures as 4x3 letterbox. Help!!!!!!!!

I want to make a widescreen video.
My camcorder (Panasonic NV-GS17) is set to cinema mode, on screen this appears as 4x3 letterbox.
I read up on the whole widescreen thing and learn that it is probably something called anamorphic widescreen but when I capture it in FCP, it's quite obviously 4x3 letterbox that's coming out of the camera.
I'm able to take this into the sequence and stretch it to 133% to get the right effect but this is a bit of a hassle.
How can I capture the video from my camcorder, into FCP and have it automatically crop and stretch the video to the correct format.
Andy
(p.s. I'm very new to final cut pro)

Ok, when I use log and capture, I see a 4x3 letterbox image, that's using Firewire PAL or Firewire PAL basic. To clarify, I see a normal (almost square) shaped image, with a black bar at the top and bottom.
When I switch to Firewire PAL Anamorphic, the same image appears but this time squished and distorted with even thicker bars at the top and bottom.
From this I can tell that the video is actually coming out of the camcorder as 4x3 letterbox, i.e. the camera is taking the normal image and placing a black bar at the top and bottom.
I know that this way I am losing a whole tonne of quality and that anamorphic would be a much better way to go, but my camcorder won't do anamorphic and I'm not going to spend money on a new camcorder or an anamorphic lens adapter just yet.
Now I've worked out that I can edit my entire video in this 4x3 letterbox format and at the end, create a new sequence as anamorphic , drag in the sequence I've created and zoom it to 133%.
This will work fine for me (I don't mind about the lack of quality, it's just a hobby). However, I would of course prefer to be able to capture the video with letterbox removed and converted to full PAL anamorphic this way it would be easier to work mix and match with genuine anamorphic at the same time as footage from this non-anamorphic camera.
It seems odd, surely this problem quite common with low cost camcorders, I would have thought that final cut pro would be prepared for this sort of thing.

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